CONGRESS INSISTS AIR FORCE BUY UNWANTED C-130S

For the 22nd year, Congress is making the Air Force buy more new C-130 military transport aircraft than it wants, changing Pentagon spending priorities and causing early retirement of previously purchased C-130s, according to congressional and military sources.

In the past three years, legislators added more than $1.3 billion to Air Force budgets for 28 C-130Js, the newest model of the U.S. military's highly regarded transport. As all of the early versions have been, the C-130J is built by Lockheed Martin Co. in Marietta, Ga., home of such powerful past and present legislators as retired Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., former chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga. Since 1978, only five out of 256 C-130s sent to the Air National Guard and Air Reserve have been directly requested by the Air Force. The rest have been added by Congress, which also selects where they are to be stationed, critics say.

The next six C-130 add-ons are in either House or Senate versions of the fiscal 1999 defense authorization or appropriations bills. Four of the planes are for the Air Force, costing $380 million, and were put in at Gingrich's request. Two more, KC-130Fs that the Navy did not request, are to be used by the Marines for tactical refueling. They were added, at a cost of $112.4 million, by the House Appropriations Committee.

House and Senate bills also contain the Air Force request for one C-130J, the first out of a five-year plan that calls for buying 18 between now and 2004.

The unrequested C-130 aircraft are often promised to local Air National Guard and Air Reserve units, thereby gaining support not just from Georgia members of Congress but also from legislators in whose states and districts the new planes will be based.

A senior Pentagon official said this week that the C-130 program represents a different twist on the old military-industrial complex: "a triangle of the Guard, Lockheed and politicians."

Of the 28 financed C-130J aircraft, 13 will go to Keesler Air Force Base in the home state of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss.; two will go to an Air National Guard unit in Harrisburg, Pa., home state of Rep. John P. Murtha, ranking Democrat on the Appropriations national security subcommittee.

A Pentagon spokesman said it is a "politically hot topic" where the six new craft will be based.

The C-130Js were to have been developed for $350 million by Lockheed without government money and introduced in 1997. As of May, development costs were more than $900 million, according to a Senate Armed Services Committee report.

At roughly $50 million apiece, the C-130J is almost 25 percent more expensive than its predecessor, a price differential that will be made up by its lower operating costs, said Lockheed spokesman Lee Whitney. The company says the new version has a longer range, more modern controls and can take off and land in a shorter space.

Whitney said the development costs would be spread over the first 130 C-130J aircraft the company sells rather than just ones sold to the U.S. government. As of Wednesday, he said, the company had 83 firm orders for the new model and options for 63 more. Of the firm orders, 28 are the ones already financed by Congress.

A General Accounting Office report in April said the Air Force has not been able to use the C-130s it already has through their useful 40-year lives because new models are forced on the service. "As a result," the GAO found, "some C-130 aircraft have been retired with substantial service life remaining and/or shortly after the aircraft had been modified."

These retirements, the GAO said, "have been driven by congressional direction to buy more C-130s than the Air Force requested in its annual budget requests."

In 1996, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Air Force studied the need for C-130s and determined there were 50 more in the inventory than needed. But Congress prevented plans to reduce the number of C-130s in the Guard and Reserve by placing restrictive language in that year's authorization bill, the GAO said.

Sen. Wendell H. Ford, D-Ky., co-chair of the Senate National Guard Caucus, has openly protected the C-130s. Last year and in 1994, he held up promotions of Air Force officers until the service withdrew plans to cut four C-130s assigned to the Kentucky Air National Guard.